Walking on Water

Award-winning essayist,
Cheryl Unruh, grounds the reader in a study of land and sky, love and life, and
death and curiosity in Walking on Water, her first book of poetry. Once
an inland sea, this place called Kansas now offers a wide-open prairie, covered
with grasses and grains which wave in the wind, mimicking that long-gone sea.
The vacant plains and open skies of her native state provide a sense of freedom
for Cheryl, and it is these elements, as well as the colorful textures of this
land and its people, that she draws from for her writing.

Through glimpses of her
childhood growing up in a tiny Kansas town, Cheryl explores finding her place
in the world and examines how Midwesterners relate to family, to friends, and
to their communities. Because one of her father’s jobs was as caretaker of the
town’s cemetery, Cheryl spent part of her youth in the graveyard, becoming
acquainted early with the concept of death. Poems in this collection reflect
her varied perspectives of death, including a childhood perception that the
afterlife took place underground.

The book isn’t all serious,
however. Readers will laugh out loud through Cheryl’s To-Do List poetry. She
employs her sense of humor, creating clashes of thought and mixing together
modern culture and spirituality, imagination and song.

Fans of Cheryl’s two
previous collections of vivid Kansas essays will delight in her poetry. New
readers will be charmed. This collection leads the reader to discover the
beauty in the simplest of landscapes, to revel in the always-changing seasons,
and to seek magic and splendor in the everyday moments of life.

Walking on Water is a refreshing and
original exploration of place: poems that speak from the earth and into the sky
of what it means to live and create in the center of the continent. From the
remnants of the inland ocean to this planet that “twists in the dark,” Cheryl
Unruh expands our ability to see and hear what’s on the edge of our horizons as
well as the seemingly simple moments that encapsulate living in “the prairie’s
open hand.” She also sparks this clear-seeing with humor, such as in “Making a
List,” a collection of to-do lists mixing the mythical and ordinary,
psychological and geographical. Memory and the power of storytelling, what lies
within and around us, and the simplicity of paying attention sing through these
poems of home as both a journey into what makes us wild and an arrival into the
essence of life.

~Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg,
2009–13 Kansas Poet Laureate

and author of Chasing
Weather (with photographer Stephen Locke)

Cheryl Unruh brings to her
poems the same insider’s insight and open-eyed sense of wonder that made her
essays about Kansas so delightful. “In a scrappy little town / wooden houses
have been / left for dead . . .” we read, and we know she has ridden those
silent, dusty, rural roads. The lines: “An airplane, / camouflaged by
constellations” have us standing beside her, searching the singularly brilliant
Milky Way that arches from horizon to horizon across the nighttime Kansas
prairie. “I listen in the dark, / the rain filling a place / I didn’t know was
empty,” she writes, and you find that Cheryl’s words work just that way for
you.

~Roy Beckemeyer, author of Music
I Once Could Dance To

Cheryl’s new book of poems
re-exhibits her keen eye for Kansas life and her heart for Kansas-land and its
people, from its coyote “running for home like a kid / late for curfew” to its
“cicadas (that) chant evening prayers.” The collection also exhibits her wit,
revealed in to-do lists that include “Spend only dimes today . . . Restripe the
zebras . . . Do not cry at elevator music . . . Blare Jimmy Buffett until the
neighbors complain . . . Toss yesterday to the wind.” Such is the way of this
collection, full of wit and wisdom, as strong as her prose, but with more vivid
light, like a thin blue butane flame.

~Kevin Rabas, author of Songs
for My Father

The hallmark of Cheryl
Unruh’s prose has always been its lyricism. Admirers of her essays and
columns—which is to say, anybody who has read them—will be delighted and not at
all surprised to learn that she produces wise, witty, painterly poems as well.